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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

> Consumers don't care about energy

Smart metering should be compulsory in all households with a display showing the current spot price. I should be able to see that right now electricity is expensive or cheap to decide if I should wash my clothes or run the AC.

Its crazy the electrical utility industry ties itself in knots to guarantee supply and meet demand peaks when consumers blindly use electricity when they feel like it. Changing demand behaviour should be a priority if we want wind and solar to become more widely used.

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This is a good point. Demand flexibility is a great resource.

However, effectively zero consumers pay the spot price currently. Distribution utilities worry that time-varying electricity prices (1) are confusing to consumers (2) any change in rates triggers regulatory review and creates winners and losers (i.e. some bills go up, others go down).

I work with utilities, and we are seeing a lot more interest in time of use and dynamic pricing. I think EVs will help a lot with socializing time-varying prices. Incentivizing consumers to charge at night is hugely beneficial for everyone, which means you can roll it out to consumers in a way that always reduces costs, making it feel less punitive than a time-varying rate that otherwise might help or hurt.

Incentivizing consumers to charge EVs at night only makes sense right now because of surplus base load capacity on the grid from nuclear and fossil fuel power plants. As the generation mix shifts more toward solar and wind it will eventually make more sense to charge during the day. The key will be to embed smart agents in EV chargers and other power hungry devices so that they can dynamically choose when to activate based on spot prices.

Wind is phenomenally cheap power, total demand at night is low, and wind production is usually highest at night. I would not be surprised if it always made sense to charge up storage at night.

The only exception would be if so much storage capacity came online that the variability of wind was completely absorbed & the arbitrage disappeared.

It depends on your location but must wind turbines produce less at night. https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/are-wind-farm...

Thanks, wasn't familiar with all those locales. I mostly think of Wyoming when I think wind power, but of course not everywhere is like Wyoming.

It's not so crazy to me that we try to maintain the same quality of life. Watching the meter and waiting until 9 PM to wash your clothes is a pretty sad state of affairs. Sweating through your clothes in a heat wave because everyone else wants AC is even worse.

Are we really ready to admit that the late 20th century was peak civilization? It seems to me we have solved all the wrong problems with technology (nitrogen fixation, disease, etc) that put natural checks on population several hundred years before we were ready to actively plan and manage population. As a result, all the problems introduced by overpopulation that are fundamentally unsolvable are getting worse and worse.

I would not be ready to admit anything of the sort, seeing as the solutions included things like decent sanitation and protection against childhood disease. The late 20th/early 21st century raised billions of people out of abject poverty. I can't imagine any viable solution to climate change (or other problems for that matter) that takes these things away.

>Are we really ready to admit that the late 20th century was peak civilization?

Unequivocally yes. If we admit it now and work hard to limit climate change it might be a local peak. If we continue on our current path it's going to end up being the global peak. There is no scenario in which we fix the climate without giving significant ground on quality of life in the first world, especially considering that ideally we should be working to bring quality of life to parity across the developed and developing world.

> Consumers don't care about energy.

Therefore lets make it illegal not to care?? You need to think more pragmatically.

I think the point was more along the lines of making it easier to care.

Incentives make it easier to care as there is a payoff of some form for doing so. Compulsion eliminates choice and has an attached penalty for not complying. It doesn't make it easier to care, it eliminates the choice entirely. They're nothing alike.

A bit late to respond to this one, but the post stated that smart metering should be compulsory. Whether you choose to pay any attention to it or not is entirely up to you.

I still wouldn't care. What's the actuall difference? $10 / month? $20? $30?

Meh, whatever; I need to start my laundy so it's ready before I go to bed. I'll eat the $30.

No, we need "smart" appliances to adapt automatically.

People will get pretty angry if the power company decides to turn their AC off on a hot day.

Are you sure about that? This is already a thing in Southern California.

It is a thing. But I suspect that people do, in fact, get pretty angry about it.

Usually there's an incentive, and you can opt out.

Maybe I'm being dense, but how would that work without potential risk or inconvenience to the user?

The user needs to be inconvenienced. Prioritizing convenience the way we do now is going to guarantee the we carry on right up until civilization collapses completely.

- Smart tanked water heaters hold heat for many hours. Shut off during high load times. Nearly invisible to user in most cases.

- Space heating & cooling pre-heats or pre-cools before anticipated peak demand & shuts off during peak. E.g. Nest Rush Hour Rewards.

- Electric dryer waits to start until rates are low. Or could even interrupt briefly during a short spike. Clothes will not mind being damp another thirty or sixty minutes.

- Electric cars charge at night

I think customers do care but there is a lot of friction in the process to change. Took me several hours to switch energy sources, should be a toggle option on an app.

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